Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

by Gabrielle Zevin

To allow yourself to play with another person is no small risk. It means allowing yourself to be open, to be exposed, to be hurt. It is the human equivalent of the dog rolling on its back—I know you won’t hurt me, even though you can. It is the dog putting its mouth around your hand and never biting down. To play requires trust and love. Many

This life is filled with inescapable moral compromises. We should do what we can to avoid the easy ones.”

There is a time for any fledgling artist where one’s taste exceeds one’s abilities. The only way to get through this period is to make things anyway.

Other people’s parents are often a delight.

And as any mixed-race person will tell you—to be half of two things is to be whole of nothing.

Beauty, after all, is almost always a matter of angles and resolve.

The world seemed filled with interesting books to read, interesting plays and movies to see, interesting games to play, interesting food to taste, and interesting people to have sex with and sometimes even to fall in love with. To Marx, it seemed foolish not to love as many things as you could. In the first months she knew him, Sadie disparaged Marx to Sam by calling him “the romantic dilettante.”

There is no purity in art. The process of how you arrive at something doesn’t matter at all.

but “friend” was a broad category, wasn’t it? “Friend” was a word that was overused to the point that it had no meaning at all.

what was the difference in the end? It was never worth worrying about someone you didn’t love. And it wasn’t love if you didn’t worry.

“Marx is always in love. He’s an emotional harlot. What does love even mean when you can find it with so many people and things?”

When she’d been retracing the walk she’d taken with him on that promise-filled dawn, she had been struck by how the exact same route could look and feel so different. One minute, Sam was there, the game was completed, and the world was filled with potential. Twelve hours later, Sam was gone, the game was far from her thoughts, and the world was grim and murderous. It is the same world, she thought, but I am different. Or is it a different world, but I am the same?

We are all living, at most, half of a life, she thought. There was the life that you lived, which consisted of the choices you made. And then, there was the other life, the one that was the things you hadn’t chosen. And sometimes, this other life felt as palpable as the one you were living.

They still had frequent and playful sex, but Zoe’s nudity was not an invitation to it.

Long relationships might be richer, but relatively brief, relatively uncomplicated encounters with interesting people could be lovely as well. Every person you knew, every person you loved even, did not have to consume you for the time to have been worthwhile.

It isn’t a sadness, but a joy, that we don’t do the same things for the length of our lives.”

The way to turn an ex-lover into a friend is to never stop loving them, to know that when one phase of a relationship ends it can transform into something else. It is to acknowledge that love is both a constant and a variable at the same time.

“What is a game?” Marx said. “It’s tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow. It’s the possibility of infinite rebirth, infinite redemption. The idea that if you keep playing, you could win. No loss is permanent, because nothing is permanent, ever.”

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I have found that the most intimate relationships allow for a great deal of privacy within them.”